Launchpad is Free at Last

The developer team at the Ubuntu firm Canonical has finally released the complete source code of its hosting and collaboration tool Launchpad to the community.

The Launchpad source code download isn't available as a packet, but rather through the same version control system that Ubuntu uses, Bazaar. Canonical promises download and implementation help on the Getting page of their wiki. The community development software is under GNU Affero Public License (AGPL).

Canonical had announced their intent to free the software in January 2009, but wanted to give itself time because of its modularity and to preserve the option to hold back two components, codehosting and soyuz. In his blog, Karl Fogel emphasized that "we changed our minds: they are included - all the code is open."

Fogel appealed to the community for patience: "Please bear with us as we learn how to be an open source team. Many of the Launchpad developers have open source experience already, of course, but as a team we've been working on Launchpad in-house for some years. This is a big change."